Enjoy this semi-realistic account of what it's like to deliver newspapers in the middle of the night.
This excerpt is from the BryonySeries novel Ruthless by Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara,
For more information on the BryonySeries, visit bryonyseries.com.
Once in the van, I’m confronted with the angry faces of twenty-four brownies which should have been twenty-five. My earlier description of them might have left out too much detail. Brownies always seemed to me as if a child drew their features, Although they are entirely brown, their lips, now formed into an angry frown, and eyebrows, now narrowed over their eyes, are darker brown then the rest. Their tongues, now wagging recriminations, are much lighter, almost yellow.
Ramon, the leader, made the most words while pointing
to an hourglass shrunk to scale in the “humans around” size.
“Brownies wait for ride to Steward’s newspaper barn,”
he proclaimed. “Brownies wait and wait and wait!”
By “Steward” he meant me, Ed Calkins, the Steward of
Tara and most ruthless dictator of all time, but now I feel like I’m being
treated like a truant. I’m tempted to kick them out of the van and make them
walk the whole way, which is ridiculous as it is ineffective. Brownies don’t
know the way to the newspaper barn.
Who will blink first? I cross my arms, eying the
brownies. They cross their arms, eying me back. Well, this isn’t getting any
work done.
Starting the van, I put the trans into reverse, but I look
back at them before releasing the brake.
“Maybe, I’ll make it up to the brownies,” I muse aloud
“Maybe I’ll give each of you one brownie point for being patient…”
The brownies uncrossed their arms but remain
suspicious.
“…to off-set the one brownie point each of you lost
for yelling at me!”
I’m driving at this point, so they are too busy
enjoying the ride to continue their protest of gestures. Some are even shouting
and screaming as one might while riding a roller coaster. The roads to my
workplace look just as they always did, yet I know without evidence that somewhere the time-scape has changed. I am in
a reality where some of the people I’ve known in life don’t exist as if they
never existed. The same might be true of people that exist here, but not in my
former life. There’s no way to tell, of course. The memory changes with the
time-scape. I know for example, that the brownies now look healthier,
handsomer, happier, more rested, then they did…when? I don’t know at this
point.
The newspaper barn, or distribution center, is now in
my headlights, and I can see that I’m again in trouble before I can park. I see
the unhappy look in one of my wives’ eyes about having to wait for me to count
the papers off the dock.
Even worse, the brownies expect to go in with me.
Policing carriers is hard enough. But having to explaining brownies to those
who believe – along with the brownies’ consequences of them trying to help - to
those that don’t is more than I can handle. Fortunately, brownies know they are
in an undiscovered land of humans.
“Now is a special time for brownies here,” I tell
them. “People work, but brownies nap now. Isn’t that nice?”
“Brownies nap in big white wheel box?” Ramon asked,
referring to my van.
“That’s the custom.” Before I can open my door, the
brownies are cluster snoring. God, I hope no one hears them.
“Good morning, wife number six,” I called to her
cheerfully, hoping for forgiveness for being late. One of the trucks has
already brought papers; Millie could have been bagging them. She notes the
promotion from wife seven to wife six, but it doesn’t save me a lecture. My
human-only wives find it unthinkable to entertain me in bed, but all of them
fulfill their marital obligation to nag.
Now Millie is one of the carriers I took with me with
when the Daily Post took over the Examiner and made things much worse for
people in the industry. Pay cuts, disrespectfulness, and impossible standards
were imposed on the remaining contractors who didn’t lose their jobs.
Millie is the only one here right now, but I find myself wondering who
will be present in this time-scape and who will be absent. For those of you
still spying on me instead of studying the Frost poem I recommended, I suppose
I’m going to have to explain ‘time-scape’ and how it works.
You guys are killing me.
This is my first day as a vampire and it’s not like I
went to vampire school, so I have to figure the whole thing out on the fly. It
would help if you stopped trying to put a timeline on this. Nothing in the
universe is straight or a line. Time may seem like two opposite vectors joined
at a single point in the present, but it’s an illusion dependent on creatures
with senses such as hearing and sight. Time is nothing more than motion, and
the present is a point but has no duration. If you look at any event occurring
in the present, you’ll discover one of three things; it’s actually in the
recent past, it’s evitable but in the recent future, or parts of it have
happened and parts of it will inevitably happen which is as close to the
present as living things can get to the here/now.
No, I’m not getting anywhere like this.
Try this. Image a basin of blood which is the history
of humanity. Let your soul prick its finger and let a drop of your blood drip
into the basin as your gift to future generations. Notice the ripple on the
surface. That ripple is your lifetime. Notice the expanding circle wave in all
directions moving away from the drop. Your conscious rides the wave from only
one perspective, but it doesn’t matter, because the view is the same from any
side. When I say time-scape, I’m talking about a point of view riding on that
ripple which is usually indistinguishable from any other time-scape in a given
lifetime.
That changes when vampires abode. When some schmuck
dies but doesn’t stop living, all time-scapes that collide with it vary from
the others in its lifetime ripple. The past changes, as well as the person’s
memories to match the new past. A single vampire will disrupt the natural order
of past and future until that vampire is destroyed, and everything returns to
normal. The basin of blood becomes placid as not to matter. Here’s what
matters: what was in that drop of blood? Only its contents will appraise the
humanity that history serves.
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